The Freewheeling Landscapes of Olive Ayhens

Olive Ayhens Website

A world of variation: Olive Ayhens' landscapes

Detail: Bonnardian dabs of color

Cars, each uniquely treated

Coastal painting, somewhere in Europe--can't remember now; where she spent time painting

Detail of the coastal city

Traffic - a recurring theme in Olive's work (she has also painted at the old WTC residency and all over the world)

New painting - animals resting in a Moorish castle;

So much love in her unique logic of animals.

Multiple perspectives, as we've come to perceive the world;

And right next to it, a gorgeous cemetery painting from the 1990s

Uneasy co-existence of elements in a newer painting

Thermonuclear plants and

a pink hotel.

Olive in the studio

In 1996 I flipped over an Olive Ayhens painting at DC Moore for its painterly facture and humorous drawing portraying a traffic jam of cars falling between rocks as if water. The serendipitous combination of real elements and imaginary landscape delighted the eye and engaged thoughts on time, place and how they are experienced and remembered. Since that show Olive exhibited and was represented by Frederiecke Taylor until its recent close; she is making new paintings in her Brooklyn studio. It is always an inspiration to see her work as it is harnessed to the real world, but not limited by its rules. Here are some of the paintings in her studio at the moment.